There have been literally dozens of adaptations of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol for stage, screen, and television, making it rather shocking that one version in all that glut should be cited with some unanimity as the best of them all: that being Brian Desmond-Hurst’s 1951 film Scrooge, released in the United States […]
The second-highest grossing film of 1994, and at the time the record-holder for most successful animated feature ever released, The Lion King occupies a very special place in my development into the angry contrarian that I am today, for it was the first time that the twelve-year-old me had ever felt something that I’ve come […]
Once again, it all comes down to Howard Ashman: it was in the late 1980s, as animation was purring along for The Little Mermaid, and the story for Beauty and the Beast was just barely starting to take form, Ashman suggested another musical project for Disney: an adaptation of Aladdin, one of the tales in […]
It is sheer coincidence of scheduling, and nothing but, that I come to write about the 1991 Disney animated feature Beauty and the Beast on Thanksgiving, but it could not possibly be more appropriate; for there is no animated film produced during my lifetime for which I am more thankful. With The Little Mermaid comfortably […]
The unprecedented financial success of The Little Mermaid, the highest-grossing animated film of all time at its first release, meant inevitably that it was going to be copied, heavily, by the films that followed it; for the Walt Disney Company certainly was not averse to making money hand-over-fist, and they also subscribed to the conventional […]
After two decades of creative floundering following the 1966 death of Walt Disney Feature Animation’s founder and namesake, the late 1980s must have seemed like a very wonderful time to be employed at that studio. For the first time, there was a clear guiding hand that directed the company’s efforts, in the form of Peter […]
When I decided – like a damn idiot – to spice up my 45-day Disney retrospective by also taking into consideration the four films directed in the 1980s by former Disney animator Don Bluth, who in that time came very close to shattering his former employer’s once-iron stranglehold on American theatrical animation, there was one […]
Soon after the 1984 takeover of Walt Disney Productions, when the future of the company’s feature animation division was still in considerable doubt, Roy E. Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg nevertheless had enough faith that they would be able to pull things out that they concocted a truly extraordinary plan for the studio’s future success: a […]
The war for dominance in American animation between Don Bluth and the Walt Disney Company had gotten a bit more intense with their dueling mouse movies in 1986, but that had nothing on the pissing match the two studios engaged in late in 1988. Both companies released a new feature on November 18 of that […]
The sequel to 2008’s Twilight is one of those movies where you’re not exactly sure even what the title is. The ad campaign clearly describes it as The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which is probably the “right” title, despite being clumsy and stupid; the opening of the film merely states New Moon, following the title […]
One would be hard-pressed to come up with two films better suited to direct comparison than Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective and Don Bluth’s An American Tail. Both are animated features created by Disney-trained animators. Both are about mice. Both are period pieces set in the late years of the 19th Century. Both were released […]
When Jeffrery Katzenberg was plopped in charge of the Disney Animation Studios in 1984, he didn’t only inherit the massively blighted production that was The Black Cauldron – there was another story that had been pushed reasonably far into pre-production before its sister project’s cost had forced a temporary shutdown. In the impersonal warehouse where […]
